Ars Technica – Your phone still functions when held to your ear, people! “…Ever since people began emerging from their pandemic isolation, I’ve seen a shocking amount of public speakerphone usage. Especially—of all places—in the grocery store. I can only assume that picking out spicy hummus and chicken tikka masala at Trader Joe’s is so boring for many people that they would rather have completely unrelated conversations, on speaker, in public, as a form of distraction. It’s not just grocery stores and SEPTA trains, of course. Just yesterday, shortly after seeing the sign, I saw a woman walking along the sidewalk talking loudly into a phone held out in front of her. When will our long national nightmare finally end? Not soon, if we can judge by that bastion of cultural reporting, the New York Post, which claimed in 2025 that speakerphone use on New York City public transit was “an unspoken act of aggression backed by the threat of violence—and everyone nearby knows it.” But New Yorkers weren’t going to do anything about it because people are “too scared of nasty blowback if they so much as look at the offender wrong.” Londoners aren’t going to act, either, as My London noted in 2023. “Londoners being Londoners,” the outlet said, “they are unlikely to approach anyone directly and ask them politely to turn the volume down, but they will spend hours and hours online discussing other ways to deal with the problem, including spending £350 on Sony noise-cancelling headphones.” I mentioned my frustrations to a friend from Chicago this week. Maybe Chicago has the answer? My friend had just encountered obnoxious speakerphone use at his local Starbucks, he said, where a couple had placed a phone on the table between them with the volume apparently on max. My friend could hear this quite clearly from two tables away, and he could not resist making his feelings known. So he marched over and told the couple that they were being loud, obnoxious, and inconsiderate… and then immediately shimmied his way out the door…”